conditions and modes of ordinary thought in modern society, I ask
you next to receive the witness of Walter Scott.

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value, and
though the early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its testimony is
of no weight, other than that of a boy's ideal. But his true works,
studied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and in the whole
range of these, there are but three men who reach the heroic type
{23}--Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse; of these, one is a
border farmer; another a freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad
cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courage
and faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly
applied, intellectual power; while his younger men are the
gentlemanly play-things of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (or
accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials they
involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent character,
earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of
hostile evil, definitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there is
no trace in his conceptions of young men. Whereas in his
imaginations of women,--in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora
MacIvor, Rose Bradwardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias
Redgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans,--with
endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power, we
find in all a quite infallible sense of dignity and justice; a
fearless, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice, to even the
appearance of duty, much more to its real claims; and, finally, a
patient wisdom of deeply-restrained affection, which does infinitely
more than protect its objects from a momentary error; it gradually
forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy lovers,
until, at the close of the tale, we are just able, and no more, to